France: Political Mobilization, Intellectuals, People

Over the last thirty years historians have shown that 1848 in France marked a great watershed in the emergence
of modern democratic political mobilization which narrowed the gap between social elites and the masses. Ernest
Labrousse and Charles Tilly have inspired two generations of research on this matter. The students of Labrousse
have been more concerned with the question of political acculturation; those of Tilly with political action. As
in the previous revolutions of 1789 and 1830, the people of Paris initiated the revolutionary process. The February
days in Paris precipitated a proliferation of clubs, voluntary associations, public meetings, cooperatives, mutual
benefit societies, and electoral committees. Similar developments occurred in France's other major cities such as
Lyon, Marseilles, Toulouse, Rouen, and Limoges. Peter Amann has shown that in Paris the club movement (with two
hundred clubs comprising between 50 and 100,000 members) was a precursor of the contemporary mass political party
in that the clubs implanted modern ideological concepts such as the democratic and social republic and right to work.
Political repression during and after the June Days of 1848 cut short this urban political ferment.

A host of historians has recently shown that political mobilization, stalled in the cities after June 1848, picked up
momentum in the countryside. Philippe Virgier, Maurice Agulhon and Ted Margadant, to cite only the most comprehensive
studies, have traced a national political network in the small towns and villages of central and southern France,
developed by the republican left, called Montagnards or dem-socs. Basing his work on these earlier historians,
Edward Berenson has shown that these networks created elaborate national channels for information and propaganda
and formulated a coherent strategy for winning the rural population. In the process they created France's first
national political party. Ted Margadant in particular reveals how, when Louis Napoleon Bonaparte staged his
coup d'état in December 1851, these networks rose in defense of the republican ideal. Allegiance
to the village or locality had thus declined in importance. Nevertheless, this transformation in political orientation
occurred not in spite of but because of the use to which republican politicians harnessed local and traditional culture
to an incipient national political culture. Vertical ties of local patronage receded in the face of the rise of
horizontal ties of social class and political solidarity. The result, as Margadant has chronicled, was the largest
peasant rising in western Europe during the nineteenth century, involving almost one-hundred-thousand men from around
nine-hundred communes. The political mobilization in 1848-1851 was especially notable and effective because of
the extraordinary interaction between intellectuals and the masses. Again Paris, Lyon, and other cities during
1848 provided intimations of this interchange, which would become much more extensive in the provinces after
1849. Working-class spokespersons such as Martin Nadaud and Agricole Perdiguier were merely the most famous
and prominent of a new generation of working class and peasant militants that emerged. However, in the urban
upheavals of the first half of 1848, only in Lyon did lower class radicals play a prominent political role.
Only after the June days, as the steadily rising level of repression sent increasing numbers of middle-class
militants (especially lawyers and journalists) to jail for their political activities, and as the political
awareness of proletarians grew, did artisans, shopkeepers, and peasant farmers became prominent and often
pivotal in republican organizations. Agulhon and Margadant in particular have shown that the proto urban
villages of the south, from Allier to the Var, proved to be ideal spaces for these "cultural brokers" who
diffused a new political awareness to the local peasants. Many of them were the educated sons of prosperous
peasants who kept strong ties to their native villages. This intricate and elaborate view of political
acculturation in the French countryside, however, has not persuaded all historians. A lively debate has
ensued as to whether agitation in the countryside was truly modern and national or merely traditional and
local. For Eugen Weber these villagers were still essentially peasants and not yet the Frenchmen he argued
they would become by 1914. Yves Marie Bercé a historian of early modern peasant revolts, also saw more
continuity than rupture in the peasant behavior of 1849-1851. Both historians argue that peasants had not yet
acquired substantial leadership roles, patron client relations still predominated, and peasants' orientation was
still local and their vocabulary still traditional. Thus the 1851 rising was a traditional Jacquerie
that saw the country pitted against the city. Tax records went up in smoke and forest and pasture rights were
returned to peasant hamlets. A national perspective and ideological issues, they argue were still too abstract
for these peasants. This historiographical controversy has still not been fully resolved. Indeed, it may never
be because it centers on the definitions of traditional and modern, concepts that are not necessarily mutually
exclusive. Margadant's final assessment that the 1851 mobilization embraced both modern and traditional elements
provided the best present perspective on the matter. Eighteen-forty-eight in France mobilized an unprecedented
of people, first in the cities and then in the villages. Politics in 1848 was inclusive rather than exclusive;
it incorporated tradition and modernity simultaneously. This mass mobilization accommodated newspapers and
clubs along with songs, folklore, and village fairs and cafés. Thus the gap between the intellectuals
and the people was bridged in an unprecedented fashion. Agulhon's phrase captures this well: politics made
its decent into the masses. This was the great political legacy of 1848 in France.

Agulhon, Maurice. The Republic in the Village: The People of the Var
from the French Revolution to the Second Republic. trans Janet Lloyd
London and Paris: Cambridge and Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1982.